Conor Broekhart lives on the Saltee Islands with his family off the coast of Ireland, the time period being the late 19th century. The islands are independent, ruled over by the benevolent King Nicholas, an old friend of Conor's parents. Conor's childhood is spent both playing around the island with the princess, Isabella, and studying with the Frenchman Victor Vigny, from whom he learns all about flight, swordplay, and other fun things.

Everything changes the day he discovers a plot to overthrow the king. This leads to him getting framed as a traitor by the would-be usurper and thrown into the prison mines of Little Saltee, where the only way off the island is by flight. Conor, only fourteen years old at the time, must call upon all of his training and wits to somehow escape, all the while trying to survive prison.

A trilogy taking place in the same universe and involving Time Travel, called WARP, was written by Colfer five years later.

Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Conor starts off like this, being a straight-up hero who grew up with a loving family. Eventually his moral compass becomes clouded, and he swings into Anti-Hero for a time.

Royals Who Actually Do Something: King Nick, and how. Not only does he run the place, he's also responsible for ensuring its technological progress while still having time for his own research projects on the side.

Isabella fills this role by the end; she's taken her role as queen and is planning major overhauls to the running of the place, including shutting down the Little Saltee prison and contracting the mining to a professional firm.

Shown Their Work: Colfer's descriptions of the period's aircraft are spot-on regarding their reliability (or lack thereof), fragility, and handling problems. He also accurately describes the effects of a stall and a forward slip.

Tampering with Food and Drink: Bonvilain has his Dragon Mix a poison, Wolvesbane, which he will put in his wine and serve to his guests (Isabella and Conor's family). The poison is fatal if an entire glass is drunk, Bonvilain would only drink half his glass while everyone else would empty theirs. He also tests it on his Dragon to see if he was telling the truth (he was chafing at this point), he was, but it still reduced him to a puking pained fit (symptoms which he warned Bonvilain about). This comes back to bite him in the climax.

Villain with Good Publicity: Although he doesn't put himself in the spotlight, Bonvilain is in a position of power and is generally well-respected.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy